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VICTORIA — Though Judi Tyabji has known Christy Clark since they were both young B.C. Liberals, more than three decades ago, she had a hard time forgiving her old acquaintance when she first took up occupancy in the premier’s office.

“To be honest, I was angry with Christy Clark for serving as deputy premier for Gordon Campbell because I felt she had sold out,” writes Tyabji in Behind the Smile, her otherwise mostly flattering book on Clark published this week.

Vaughn Palmer: How Gordon Wilson returned home to the Liberal partyBack to video

“I still remembered how viciously she went after my husband Gordon Wilson when he was a cabinet minister in Glen Clark’s government. Her return to politics had me grumbling again.”

The Wilson-Tyabji saga supplies a telling backstory to the book. For those unfamiliar with the details, Wilson led the upstart Liberals to a surprising second-place finish in 1991 election. Tyabji was elected as a rookie MLA and Wilson later appointed her house leader.

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But things got unstuck after it came out that the party leader and his house leader were having an affair. He was forced into a leadership race which was won by Gordon Campbell. Wilson and Tyabji quit the Liberals, married, and, still later, he joined the New Democratic Party as a cabinet minister.

By then Clark, who’d briefly worked as a staffer in the Wilson-led Opposition, was herself an elected Liberal MLA. In legendary exchange, she berated NDP minister Wilson for excessive travel spending and he fired back that “unlike her, I don’t have a broom to travel on.”

That sets up one of the more entertaining passages in the book, as Tyabji recounts how the quick-witted Clark responded to being called a witch. She gave a memorable interview to BCTV (now Global) in her front yard, all the while cradling the neighbour’s black cat in her arms.

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Fast forward the run up to the 2013 B.C. election. Wilson had been out of the game since losing in 2001. Tyabji had been in business since losing her seat in 1996.

To the degree that she was interested in politics, she leaned to the NDP. “I still perceived Christy Clark’s government to be an extension of Gordon Campbell’s.”

But at the prompting of her sister and her father, both engaged in business in the Okanagan, Tyabji began to reconsider.

“I took some time to ask myself why I was so angry with Christy Clark,” writes Tyabji in a disarming passage. “I realized I was jealous. Christy Clark was someone I had known since we were teenagers. We were about the same age, and somewhere deep down, I was angry that she was premier and I wasn’t.

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“That little bit of honesty made me laugh because I knew all too well what she had to sacrifice to be premier, and I had deliberately left politics because I was not prepared to make those sacrifices. I mentally kicked myself in the backside and decided to get over my pettiness.”

She then went to work on Wilson — “to say we had a spirited discussion is a bit of an understatement” — and persuaded him to give Clark a second look as well. “As usual, his research was excellent,” reports Tyabji.

Having both concluded that it was time to come home to the Liberal party under Clark’s leadership, they began to spread the word through social media.

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Enter Mark Marissen, the premier’s ex-husband and still supporter, who was serving on the executive of the provincial campaign at Clark’s behest in his capacity as a longtime supporter of the federal Liberal party.

“I saw Gordon Wilson defending the B.C. Liberal budget on Twitter,” recounted Marissen in an interview with Tyabji. “I decided to try to talk to him.

“I consider Gordon Wilson to be the founder of the modern-day B.C. Liberal Party. Having someone like Gordon Wilson back in the fold would go a long way to showing that Christy had some real Liberal credentials that predate Gordon Campbell. I thought it would be great to have some kind of public announcement that he was supporting Christy Clark.”

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But it was an uphill battle to persuade the Liberal campaign team that the endorsement would be a plus. “Wilson was seen as a wild card and enemy,” reports Tyabji. Marissen “had to fight with people” to get it done.

“It was a fight he won because the premier wanted it to happen.”

The result was a video, myriad social media postings, and a spate of news stories about Wilson’s return to the party he’d once led. Plus there was a welcoming quote from Clark: “As a moderate voice, as someone who has been really passionately, over the last 20 years, speaking on behalf of those social issues that matter to people, I think he does have a real presence and pull.”

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The story of Wilson and Tyabji’s return to the fold occupies an entire chapter in Behind the Smile. Wilson, never shy about estimating his importance in the scheme of things, maintains the move was critical to the Liberal win: “I am told by people who were working in the campaign that my endorsement gave middle-of-the-road voters who were confused permission to support the party.”

Clark, no fan of Gordon Campbell and protective of her roots in the Wilson-led version of the party, may be of the same view. For she has since rewarded Wilson with a $150,000-a-year contract to promote opportunities for B.C. businesses in the liquefied natural gas industry.

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